Hovering in the shadows of President Barack Obama's decision
last week to ramp up the nation's war effort in Afghanistan, even
as he promises to bring it to a swift conclusion, are ghosts of
another decision, made 44 years ago by a Texan in the White
House.

In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like
Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops
in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House,
Johnson sent them.

Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands
more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
Johnson's presidency - and many argue, Johnson himself - were
destroyed long before America could finally, 10 years later, quit
Vietnam.

Obama's decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan
has reawakened those memories of Vietnam's early days, and brought
unsettling comparisons from an array of historians who have spent
their careers studying Johnson.

"Iraq and Afghanistan stand in the shadow of Vietnam," said
historian Robert Dallek, a Johnson biographer. "It becomes
inescapable that people are going to have doubts and questions
about the wisdom of trying to control so distant and foreign a
place."

Many of those doubts, historians now know, were shared by
Johnson himself, as revealed by White House tapes of telephone
recordings released to historians over the years. Listening to them
again this week chilled some of the men who know best what that
decision cost Johnson.

"It was eerie," said historian Harry Middleton, a former Johnson
White House aide who led the presidential library that bears
Johnson's name in Austin for 30 years. "As these discussions are
taking place this week, we can hear echoes of conversations from
our past. ... I am quite fearful about it, as I do have the feeling
that well, we've been down this path before."

That's a view shared by former Sen. George McGovern, whose stand
against the Vietnam War helped him capture the 1972 Democratic
nomination for president, only to lose badly to President Richard
Nixon.

"I think this is a dreadful mistake on President's Obama's
part," McGovern said. "It makes me sad. I am for him. I worked for
him, and I still think he is a brilliant man. But it looks to me
like Vietnam all over again."

Campaign issue

Johnson had campaigned in 1964 on a premise that Vietnam was not
an American war, and ran decidedly to the left of hawkish Barry
Goldwater. But immediately upon winning his first full term,
pressure mounted to use the U.S. military more aggressively to
support the struggling South Vietnamese government.

By early 1965, Westmoreland had requested more troops. Inside
the White House, Johnson sought opinions from key officials and
confidantes alike. Most were in favor of sending the troops, but
some warned it was a fateful mistake, Middleton said.

"1965, when he decided to honor Gen. Westmoreland's request for
a massive infusion of troops and to really change the mission of
those troops from an advisory role to combat, he held a number of
meetings in the weeks leading up to that decision, and solicited a
number of points of view. ... Clark Gifford, a close friend of the
president, said, 'We send in 100,000 troops, they'll match us with
a hundred thousand of their own. I see nothing but catastrophe for
our country.' "

Johnson was aware from the beginning how ruinous the decision
could be for his presidency, historians said last week.

"Johnson did not make this decision casually or with kind of a
flick of his wrist. He understood that putting in 100,000 troops in
July of 1965 and then to continue to escalate in '66, '67, that
these were big, important and decisive decisions of his
administration and for the country," said Dallek, author of Hail to
the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents.

Still, the arguments against sending troops were drowned out by
the prevailing Cold War-era fear of the global spread of
communism.

"In the end, what was far more persuasive ... came from
[Secretary of State] Dean Rusk," Middleton said. "Rusk said if we
didn't go and we lost the war, then that was tantamount to World
War III. That was tremendously persuasive to everyone there."

Rusk recalled those early debates in a 1969 oral history now
stored at the LBJ Library.

"Not only would Southeast Asia be overrun, but the fidelity of
the United States under its security treaties all over the world
would be brought into question. In Asia we have treaties with
Korea, Japan, the Republic of China, the Philippines, Thailand,
Australia, New Zealand," he said. "If those who would become our
enemies made the judgment that our participation in those treaties
was merely a bluff, then those treaties would have no deterrent
effect."

McGovern said he remembered those debates, too, from his perch
as a freshman senator who had opposed the Vietnam involvement as
early as 1963.

"That domino theory was a powerful factor," he said. "It has a
kind of sweet logic to it. You look at a catastrophe in the making,
but they say there will be an even bigger catastrophe. If we don't
stop them there, then we're going to have to fight them in Taiwan,
the Philippines, Hawaii, or New York or Dallas, Texas."

Parallels now

The arguments put Johnson in a corner, and he feared being seen
as a president who lost a war, historians said.

"I'll tell you, the more that I stayed awake last night thinking
of this thing, the more I think of it, I don't know - it looks like
to me we're getting into another Korea," Johnson said in 1964
during a tape-recorded conversation with national security adviser
McGeorge Bundy. "It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see
what we can ever hope to get out of it, once we're committed."

McGovern, who campaigned hard for Johnson, said he had expected
Johnson to pull back after gaining the presidency in his own right
in 1964.

"I had thought President Johnson would probably stand firm until
after the election, and then being a shrewd politician which he was
and a highly intelligent man, he would figure out how to get us out
of the situation. ... But I had some compassion for him, as I was
sure he went through agony."

Obama went to great lengths last week to cast his decision to
send more troops to Afghanistan in an entirely different light than
Johnson's decision in 1965. Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Obama said
in his address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Republicans generally praised the decision, both in Washington
and elsewhere. Even Gov. Rick Perry, who would not even watch
Obama's inauguration in January, told supporters in Dallas last
week that Obama did the right thing. Texas has lost 48 troops in
Afghanistan and nearby theaters, second only to California.

R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. ambassador to NATO and later
undersecretary of state for political affairs for President George
W. Bush, said Obama's decision was the right one, and said it
triggered sighs of relief in foreign capitals throughout Asia and
elsewhere.

"This is a major moment in his presidency. I imagine there is a
lot of pressure on him because he knows these decisions write the
history of his four years in office," Burns said. "Since the close
of the second world war, this country has been the lone guarantee
of stability in the world. ... We cannot shrink from our
responsibilities because there is no other country on a global
basis that can do what we do."

The fear factor

Professor George C. Edwards of Texas A&M University, founder
and former director of the Center for Presidential Studies, also
said Obama is right. Vietnam and Afghanistan are different, he
said.

"If I was president, I would have made a decision to keep up the
pressure there," he said. "I think there is less potential that the
Taliban can put together a strong enough force that will cause us
to send enormous numbers of troops. ... They can't engage in
massive warfare, as the Vietnamese were able to."

Still, decisions about war are often made out of a kind of fear,
Edwards said. Worries about the dominoes in Vietnam, for instance,
or about the possibility of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein before
the invasion of Iraq, or worries about terrorists seizing Pakistani
weapons - all of these doomsday scenarios weigh heavily in favor of
a president sending troops on a mission like the one in
Afghanistan.

As president, "you are scared of it," Edwards said. "It's very
tough to overcome that. ... It's a very tough situation for
presidents. All of these decisions are made under conditions of
great uncertainty."

Dallek says the risks of escalation are always enormous - for
the country and for the president.

"History tells us that the only real decision a president has is
whether to fire the first shot, so to speak. Once you get in there,
you have our troops in there, and it becomes very hard to withdraw.
Can you shut this down? Just walk away? No. it becomes an
impossibility. In a sense, Obama is putting all his chips in."

Burns said he has faith in the generals fighting the war in
Afghanistan, and in their counterinsurgency strategy. But if it
doesn't work, he said, they and Obama will simply "have to find the
courage and the wisdom to develop a new strategy that does."

McGovern sees in that an eerie echo of the war he opposed since
he first was elected senator in 1962.

"We're headed down the same road," he said. "And [Obama] is not
going to get out of there with only sending 30,000, and we are not
going to come out in 2011. Two years from now, he's going to look
up and say, 'Gosh we have lost 5,000 troops over there, we can't
pull out now.' It's a no-win proposition. And in Afghanistan,
nobody has ever been able to prevail in that deserted and
mountainous country."

WHAT THEY SAID

Afghanistan and Vietnam parallels

George McGovern, 1972 Democratic candidate for president, who
campaigned and lost on a platform against the Vietnam War:

"I always ached for Johnson during the Vietnam period. I didn't
know then as I do now that he was actually opposed to war. ... He
despised that war right from the beginning. ... He knew it was a
mess and knew it was a mistake."

R. Nicholas Burns, Harvard professor of diplomacy and former
U.S. ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush:

"I am a citizen and taxpayer, too, and I know we can't be
everywhere. But we must be at those places where we think we have
vital national interests. I actually think this Afghanistan
engagement is more critical for us than the Iraq war. ... I am not
a historian, but our interests in Afghanistan seem to me to be more
vital than those we had in Vietnam in the '60s."

Harry Middleton, former LBJ staffer and for 30 years the
director of his presidential library in Austin:

"I've attended a hundred dinner table conversations with
President Johnson - or if wasn't that many it seemed like it -
where he would push back from the table and ask again and again,
'What could we have done differently?' I think he went to his grave
knowing full well how extremely costly his decision had been for
both his presidency and for the country."